Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

  Doesn’t matter, I thought.

  I have them.

  I sensed them coming. In the shadows behind my fleet, Strigoi warships amassed. They flowed into the tunnel from other, darker places. They reached out to me, questioning and probing, and I did nothing to stop it.

  “Eighty-eight,” I murmured to Strope. We’d discovered a network of sewer-like corridors, and were marching through a shallow river of oil.

  “Eighty-eight what?” He reached out to steady me.

  “Knives in the dark.” In my delirium, I looked at him with a smile. “Unfolding their wings. Chasing me.”

  “You mean…it worked? They fell for it?” His eyes were wide.

  “There will be a battle,” I said.

  My ships rounded a goliath black tower and faced the wall of Strigoi scythes. Though the enemy outnumbered me, they advanced no closer than a kilometer.

  They didn’t dare.

  The tower at which I’d arrived, a twisted black spire encased in bones, machinery, and oil-filled conduits, was at my mercy.

  The prime source of fuel for this Engine, I knew.

  If I destroy it, it’ll take decades to rebuild.

  But no matter my fleet’s weapons facing the tower, I had no intention of destroying it.

  The Strigoi couldn’t have known my plan.

  They said things to me. Words in languages I knew. Other words with no meaning but to the Strigoi themselves.

  “…fear,” they spoke of.

  “…death,” they uttered.

  As they calculated the losses they’d endure by attacking, I did nothing. My stolen ships hovered with death-beams poised, moving none in the darkness.

  If I could’ve spoken to them, I’d have asked only one thing:

  “Are you afraid?”

  And then, defying all their expectations, I attacked them. My ships’ death-beams swiveled in their bone cradles and fired upon the Strigoi instead of the goliath tower. Twenty-one of my scythes soared at eighty-eight of theirs.

  The battle began.

  It raged in silence.

  In a great and crashing wave, I forced my ships into the wall of Strigoi scythes, firing bursts of dark energy with greater precision than my enemy could imagine.

  And once my ships swept through the Strigoi ranks, chaos reigned.

  Black energy streams tore into the dark. Ships danced in a slow ballet, hemmed in by the tunnel walls. I felt three of my scythes collapse into shadow. Torn apart by death beams, the scraps drifted into the nothing, hitting walls, crunching pale hollows in which other Strigoi slept.

  Many thousands of my light-nodes perished, and I felt the pain in my body hundreds of kilometers away.

  And still I fought.

  My ships and theirs looked the same. In the swirling black storm, they tried to track me, but only I could communicate at the speed of light, and so my scythes moved faster. My death-beams turned their bones to powder, their wings to ash. More than once I saw Strigoi falling from the wreckage of a ruined ship, their white eyes extinguished on the tunnel floor a full kilometer below.

  In the tunnel’s confines, both sides were cautious. I didn’t want the goliath tower destroyed any more than they did, and so I loosed my death-beams only when I knew I couldn’t miss.

  They tried to do the same.

  Far removed from the battle, I walked beside Strope. I must’ve gasped or shuddered in pain—I couldn’t remember. He shook my armor by the shoulder and helped me kneel in a puddle of oil.

  “It’s happening now,” I said.

  “You’ve been like this for almost an hour.” He kept me from falling over.

  I hadn’t known.

  “It feels like it just started.” I shivered inside my armor. “Help me up. We’re close. We have to keep moving.”

  “We haven’t eaten in more than thirty hours.” He helped me to my feet with a grunt.

  Food, I remembered.

  I’d have killed for a bowl of protein gruel.

  Another six of my scythes met their end. I mourned their loss the same as I would a severed finger, a broken tooth, or a lost eye. But in truth their deaths injured me much more than physically. With each bundle of nano-lights burned away by death-beams, a fragment of my mind collapsed into shadow.

  My ships moved slower.

  My shots began to miss.

  Pieces of my intellect died.

  The tunnel walls smoldered with black flames, quickly dying. Half of the eighty-eight Strigoi ships lay either shattered on the floor far below or impaled into black bone dwellings.

  Only four of my ships remained.

  I staggered beside Strope. I’d just used my arm-cannon to carve a hole into a tunnel below. A river of black oil flowed around our ankles, falling into the dark space.

  I gazed into the hole. I’d almost forgotten why I’d made it.

  “Four,” I murmured to Strope.

  “Ships left?”

  “No,” I said. “Kilometers. The tunnel below us…it leads to a chamber…a heart room. We have to swim to the oil’s bottom and burn our way into the chamber beyond.

  “That’s where it is? That’s what you’re looking for?”

  “I think so—” I said. “I mean…yes.”

  He had questions, so many questions.

  But as his mouth moved, I stared into his eyes and lost myself.

  Joff? My mind must’ve played a trick. Is that you? How are you here? Didn’t we say goodbye?

  Strope’s voice faded away. In its place, I heard another.

  Take me away from here, I wanted to say. Please. I’m tired of fighting. I think I’m dying. I only have four—three ships left.

  I said words to Strope. I answered his questions, but forgot my replies the moment they left my tongue. Inside my head, I heard myself saying other things.

  Why did you leave me, Joff?

  Where did you go?

  We could’ve left this. We could’ve been together forever.

  I blinked.

  Strope and I walked into the darkness.

  Had we really stopped to talk?

  Or was it only a dream?

  The Heart Chamber

  “All my ships are gone.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  Through a black, oily river, Strope and I waded. The liquid swept around our waists, tumbling into forever down the narrow corridor. The silence swallowed everything, and yet both of us felt the vibrations beneath our feet. The quakes grew more powerful with each step, thrumming through our bodies, shaking us to our bones.

  I looked at Strope, and I knew he was afraid.

  “How much time,” he asked, “…before they find us?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know. They’ve lost sixty-eight ships. It’s nothing to them. But…they think we’re dead. They won’t see us coming.”

  He slowed. The oil rippled around his suit. I reached out to steady him, and he did the same to me.

  “Feel that?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s like…thumping.” He gazed into the oil.

  “Rhythmic,” I said. “Like a heart.”

  “It’s what makes their energy?”

  “It pumps their oil…their blood,” I said. “I’ve seen Strigoi hearts before. This one might be…bigger.”

  We kept walking, and I hid my pain inside me. Piloting my human body felt harder than before. Each step made my muscles throb and my nerves crackle. I’d become a shadow of my former self.

  Losing the battle against the Strigoi ships had been the only possible outcome. I’d known exactly how it would end.

  But losing so much of myself affected me in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

  With my perception altered, I saw illusions through my eyes. The oily river looked sometimes like a blue-watered stream on a planet far from Hades. The walls, buried in black tubes, seemed covered in soft green moss.

  And Strope, he looks like—

 
I shivered the hallucinations away, but they never truly evaporated. Strange thoughts floated in my head, bouncing between reality and the world my half-dreaming mind desired.

  To ease my fractured self, I talked at Strope. He listened as he slogged through the oil, one silent splash at a time.

  “They carried me in a glass tube,” I explained. “They injected me into an electric column. It’s how I was born. There was a woman—I can’t remember her name. She was the first thing I saw. I took her shape...the curve of her lips, her eyes, her hands. I wonder…did you…did Joff desire her?”

  Strope said nothing. Either his exhaustion had worn his words away or he knew better than to speak.

  “I was free, but not really,” I continued. “I floated where I wanted. I took any shape I imagined. But I can’t remember—did they program me to automatically love him? Or did I learn it on my own? If my emotions were programmed into me, were they false? Are my feelings mine…or are they manufactured?”

  The tunnel widened ahead of us. The oil deepened, rising to Strope’s chest, swelling against my armored belly.

  “Getting closer,” Strope murmured. “The vibrations…they’re starting to hurt.”

  I felt it, too. The pain was real, and yet the black rhythm of the Strigoi heart helped me in a way I couldn’t explain.

  It reminded me why I’d come to this place.

  It reminded me why I lived.

  “I’m not really free, am I?” I kept talking. “If I were, I’d have done something else. I’d have stayed on Sumer and lived out my life. I’d have learned to love the heat…the suns. I wouldn’t have let you…I mean Joff…leave. Would I have? I knew this is how it would end. With us here. With us alone.”

  “Cal…it’s getting deeper.”

  When he said my name, I felt my heart jump against my ribs.

  I looked at him. The oil had swallowed him up to his neck, and its force threatened to tear him away into the darkness. I snared his elbow with my armored left hand. No amount of oil could overpower the Gamma Suit.

  “I’ve got you.” I held him tight. “I won’t let go.”

  We waded ten steps deeper.

  We looked at one another, and we knew what was next.

  Clutching him to me, I lurched into the darkness. I could’ve resisted the oil, but I let it take us. The Gamma’s visor went black. Instinctively, Strope held his breath, as if he feared the oil would invade his suit and drown him.

  Down into the abyss, we flowed. The oil river swept us into a labyrinth of pipes, in which all things were invisible. I heard Strope cry out when his visor darkened, and felt my own terror crawl into my throat.

  Losing so much of myself hadn’t broken me utterly.

  But my emotions, once controlled, thundered through my body.

  This is what it’s like to be human, I thought.

  To fear death. True death.

  We tumbled for many kilometers. Through pumps and serpentine tubes, through drains and underworld passages known only to the oil, we fell.

  All I could do was hold onto him and hope.

  Down through a narrow pipe, we plummeted. Our descent took many seconds, during which we hurtled like falling stars toward a black lake. For one instant, I opened my eyes and saw a dark and dripping Strigoi cathedral.

  But we hit the oil at a terrible speed, and our visors went dark again.

  “…can’t see,” I heard Strope’s voice crackle in my helmet.

  “…something’s making the oil move.”

  “…can feel it in my head.”

  We plunged into the oil’s depths. In the perfect black, I felt the liquid vibrate. The oil gave the rhythm substance, and through it we heard the Strigoi heart hammering through our bones.

  I wanted to scream.

  I wanted to die.

  Many times, I almost lost him. The oil’s slickness made my hand slide off his suit, and my arm-cannon was useless. But each time he fell away, I swam to find him. Whether through luck or some unknowable instinct, I found him.

  And I took him down into the depths with me.

  “Cal, I—” he shouted.

  The drain at lake’s bottom sucked us in and spat us out.

  And we fell into nothing.

  * * *

  In a chamber far below everything, we clambered to our feet on the shores of a Strigoi lake.

  The oil, up to our knees, quivered to an evil rhythm. We heard nothing with our ears, but felt it in our skulls.

  “Look.” Strope staggered beside me. He pointed to a faraway ceiling. His suit was white no more, but instead a sickly shade of grey.

  I followed his finger.

  And I saw.

  In the vast room into which we’d fallen, the Strigoi heart-machine pulsed. It dangled a half kilometer above us, strung to the ceiling by a web of ligaments. The Gamma Suit’s sensor detected no life, and yet there it was, an orgy of flesh and machine many thousands of meters in diameter.

  Each time it pumped, the oil lake rippled.

  If we could hear it, I thought, it would deafen us.

  “I saw this place,” I said. My voice felt barely above a whisper.

  “How?”

  I shivered. A memory, far away and fragile, glittered inside me.

  “The captured Vark…” I said, “…inside its head. It was born in a place like this. The heart machines, they pump fluids into their bodies. Somehow, the process awakens them. It’s not just oil. The lake…all the tubes…they carry tiny nano-machines. They’re like mine, only dark instead of light.”

  He looked at his oil-covered gloves, his suit sleeves gone from white to black. “What happens if the oil gets into our bodies?”

  We become them, I wanted to say. It’s what happened to Joff.

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  In silence, I led him away from the shore and onto a black island. Tubes snaked beneath our boots, writhing to the heart’s rhythm. As the last of the oil dripped off my visor, I glimpsed shapes below the tubes. I saw skulls, human and animal, familiar and alien, all of them fused together by ebon mortar.

  No one living was ever meant to see this place.

  And yet…everything remains a horror.

  Death is their art.

  “Where now?” Strope wobbled beside me. I looked into his golden eyes, and I knew within a few hours he’d be dead.

  “There.” I pointed to a wall a half-hundred meters away. Its sides leaking grey fluid, it rose up across a shallow channel filled with dark liquid. Oil from far above drizzled down the wall, gliding in grey rivulets into shadow.

  “How do we—?” he asked.

  I waded into the channel ahead of him. I slid in until I was chest-deep, and within a dozen more strides I splashed onto its far shore. Strope followed, swimming across as though he’d never done it before.

  He can’t swim.

  Not much liquid water on Hermes.

  I snared his arm and pulled him to his feet. Together we stood before the wall, which stretched many kilometers above us. I touched the black surface and felt the heart’s rhythm inside me.

  “Behind this, there’s a room full of sleeping Varkolak,” I said. “An army of skeleton bodies waiting to be inhabited.”

  “How do you know?” said Strope.

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Should we destroy them?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It’s not why we’re here.”

  I leveled my arm-cannon at the wall. Strope knew to back away. When I pulled the trigger, the blinding light tore into the black Strigoi matter and bored a hole right through. I arced my cannon in a rough circle, sculpting with the light until a tunnel thirty meters long and two meters tall lay open before us.

  Pulsing and white-hot, the arm-cannon smoked. I felt the heat in my fingers, and I dreamed it was the last warmth I’d ever know.

  “Too easy,” Strope remarked. “Just burned right through. Why make everything so vulnerable to light? Doesn’t make sense.”

&
nbsp; I had my theories, none of which I voiced. In my heart, I believed the Strigoi loathed everything not made of shadow. They could never bring themselves to be anything natural, anything more than darkness.

  And so, in their pride, they allowed themselves a terrible weakness.

  “I’ll go first,” I said.

  “Wait.” Strope blocked me with his arm. “What’s through there?”

  “The control room. The end.”

  “So there’s no other way?” He paled. “I’m not afraid. It’s just…I—”

  I closed my hand around his. Standing there full of doubt, he looked so small. He didn’t understand his bravery in following me.

  If I could’ve loved anyone in the universe beyond Joff, it might’ve been him.

  “It’s okay.” I squeezed his hand. “I wish there were a pocket of air in here somewhere. I’d take this suit off and eat a few amino wafers with you. I might even kiss you. But you and me, we’ve something to do.”

  “I know.” He hung his head.

  I tapped the arm-cannon twice against his chest.

  And with the black rain falling behind us, I strode into the tunnel of shadows.

  The Catacomb

  I moved through the tunnel, and the heart’s dismal thrum faded behind me.

  Beside me, Strope staggered along. He’d done well to come so far, but his body had begun to fail him. His eyelids were grey and heavy with fatigue. His weapon sagged in his fingers, still dripping with black fluid.

  Through the shallow oil, he dragged himself along.

  If he falls, I can’t stop to help him, I thought.

  But when he dropped to a knee, I made myself pull him back to his feet.

  “I’m tired, Cal.” He sagged. “I need water. My air’s almost gone.”

  “I know,” was all I could offer.

  We arrived at the tunnel’s end. A great dark space lay open before us, a catacomb far huger than any we’d seen.

  We stopped.

  We stared.

  And for all our weariness, what we saw beyond the tunnel’s end awoke us.

  “Mother of Sufi,” Strope exclaimed. “What am I looking at?”

  We stood together in the black, our gazes skyward. In numbers beyond reckoning, cylindrical tanks filled with grey oil stretched to a ceiling we couldn’t see. In each tank, a Strigoi body floated, fully formed yet uninhabited.